Small Memories

by José Saramago

  One day, a neighbor of ours—well, I call him neighbor not because we knew him, but because he lived in the same street (which, at the time, was still Rua Padre Sena Freitas)—went mad. He was a young man in his twenties who was said to have lost his wits by reading and studying too much. Just like Don Quixote. I remember one attack he had, the only one we actually witnessed, for afterward we heard nothing more of him and presumed that he had been interned in Rilhafoles, the local insane asylum. Anyway, on that day, we—my mother, Conceição and I—heard terrible, heartrending cries coming from outside and ran to the window to find out what was going on. He lived on the top floor of a much taller building than ours, on the other side of the road and slightly to the right of the house we lived in, on the corner of Rua Cesário Verde. We saw him appear at the window again and again, as if he were intending to throw himself out, the proof of which was that two hands immediately appeared behind him, tugging at him, while he struggled and cried out over and over, in the most pitiful way: "Ay, Santo Hilário! Ay, Santo Hilário!" Why he was calling on Santo Hilário we never found out. Shortly afterward, an ambulance arrived, he was bundled inside and never came back, not at least during the time we lived there.

  By then, I was already studying at technical college, the Escola Industrial de Afonso Domingues, in Xabregas, after two short years at secondary school, the Liceu Gil Vicente, which in those days was part of the São Vicente de Fora monastery. Here follows a chronology of my brief career as a student: I entered secondary school in 1933, when I was still only ten (classes started in October and my birthday falls in November), I was there during the school terms of 1933ߝ1934 and 1934ߝ1935, and I left to go to the technical college when I was comingup to thirteen. Of course, since technical subjects like Trade Skills, Mechanics and Mechanical Design form no part of the normal secondary school curriculum, I was in the first year for those subjects and the second year for everything else. So the sequence of my career there was as follows: '35ߝ'36, second and first year; '36ߝ'37, third and second; '37ߝ'38, fourth and third, '38ߝ'39, fifth and fourth, '39ߝ'40, fifth. The excursion to Sameiro—the one where I rode the horse that ignored me when I got off—took place at the end of '38ߝ'39 school year, just before the exams, and during that trip, I had the misfortune to twist my left foot jumping over something, cracking my heel bone in the process. As a result, I had to spend more than a month with a plaster cast up to my knee. There was a curved metal bar on the bottom of the cast, the ends of which were embedded in the plaster, and this was called a stirrup. That plaster boot was elaborately decorated with signatures, drawings and doodles by my fellow students. One of them suggested using it as a crib in the math exam: "Just pull up your trouser leg and Bob's your uncle." I managed to pass the exam without following his advice.

  I think the time has come for me to tell you about another episode related to my arrival in the world. As if the delicate identity problem provoked by my surname wasn't enough, there was a further problem with the date of my birth. I was born on November 16, 1922, at two o'clock in the afternoon, and not on November 18 th as the register of births, marriages and deaths would have it. My father was working away from home at the time and so not only was he unable to be present at his son's birth, the earliest he could get back was shortly after December 16th, probably the 17th, which was a Sunday. Then, and I imagine now as well, a child's birth had to be registered within thirty days or you had to pay a fine. In those patriarchal times, and given that it was a legitimate birth, it would never have occurred to anyone that my mother or some other relative could go to the registry office, and given that the father of a child was officially considered to be the newborn's sole progenitor (on my enrollment card for secondary school, only my father's name appears, not my mother's), we waited for his return, and so as not to have to cough up for the fine (any amount, however small, would have been too much for the family's pocket), two days were added to my actual date of birth, and the problem was solved. Life in Azinhaga being what it was, painful and difficult, men would often go away to work for weeks on end, which is why I couldn't have been the first or the last example of such minor deceits. When I die, I will be two days older than the birth date on my identity card, but I hope no one will notice.

  Living to our right on the same floor (we had not yet left Rua Padre Sena Freitas) was a family comprising a couple and their young son. The husband worked as a painter at the Viúva Lamego ceramics factory in Largo do Intendente. The wife was Spanish, although I don't know from which part of Spain, and her name was Carmen, and their son, a fair-haired little boy, would have been about three (that's how I still remember him, as if he had never grown during all the time we lived there). We were good friends, the husband and I, which must seem surprising, given that he was an adult, practicing a profession unusual in my tiny world, and I was just an awkward adolescent, full of doubts and certainties, although unaware of either. His surname was Chaves, I can't remember his first name or perhaps I never knew it, and so for me he was always and only Senhor Chaves. To keep ahead of his work or possibly to earn extra money, he would often work late at home, and that was when I used to visit him. I would knock on the door, his wife would open it—she was always very brusque and barely took any notice of me—and I would go through to the little dining room where there stood, in one corner, lit by a reading lamp, the potter's wheel at which he worked. The high stool on which I always sat was there waiting for me. I used to enjoy watching him painting the already glazed ceramics with an almost gray paint which, after firing, would become the familiar blue of that particular type of pottery. And as the flowers, volutes, arabesques and scrolls flowed from his brushes we would talk. I may have been young and with, as you can imagine, limited experience of life, but I sensed that this sensitive, refined man was lonely. Today, I'm sure of this. I continued to visit him even when my family moved to Rua Carlos Ribeiro, and one day, I took him a few lines of popular verse I had written and which he then transferred onto a little heart-shaped dish whose intended recipient was Ilda Reis, with whom I had just started going out. If my memory serves me right, that must have been my first "poetic composition," rather belated, it must be said, when you consider that I was almost eighteen or had already turned eighteen. Chaves was lavish with his praise and thought I should enter it in the jogos florais, as the delightful poetry contests much in vogue at the time were known and whose very innocence saved them from seeming ridiculous. The fruit of my poetic inspiration read thus: "Careful, now, lest someone hear/ The secret I unfold:/ I give to you a china heart/ for my heart you already hold." You must admit that I would have deserved, at the very least, second prize...

  The couple did not appear to get on very well, and his unpleasant Spanish wife found everything about Portugal detestable. While he was patient and refined, discreet and measured in his speech, she was the guardia civil type, tall and surly and rather broad in the beam, with a way with words that pitilessly garbled the language of Camóes. That wouldn't have mattered so much if she hadn't been so aggressive. It was in their house that I first started listening to Radio Sevilla after the Spanish Civil War had begun. Oddly enough, given that she was Spanish, I never found out for certain which side they supported. I suspect, however, that Doña Carmen had sided with Franco from the start. Listening to Radio Sevilla, I got into a terrible mental twist from which it took me a long time to free myself. The Nationalist General Queipo de Llano used the station to make his propaganda broadcasts, of which, needless to say, I remember not a word. What did stick in my memory was the jingle that always followed and which went: "If lovely colors make you sing, Revi paints are just the thing." There would be nothing very special about this if it weren't for the fact that I had become convinced that it was General Queipo de Llano himself who recited this cheery advertisement as soon as his broadcast was over. A necessary addendum to the "minor matter" of the Spanish Civil War. Forgive my frivolity. More serious was my throwing out with the rubbish, a few months later, the map of Spa
in in which I had been sticking pins to mark the advances and retreats of the armies of both sides. It goes without saying that my sole source of information was the censored Portuguese press, which, like Radio Seville, never reported a Republican victory.

  Leandro wasn't the only one to suffer the occasional bout of dyslexia or whatever it was. For example, I insisted that the word sacerdote—"priest"—should be pronounced "saquerdote," but since, at the same time, I suspected that I must be wrong, if ever I had to say the word (given that it was such an "erudite" word, this can't have happened very often and would happen even less today, when there are so few priests), I would always find a way of mumbling the word so that no one would have to correct me. I must have been the inventor of the so-called benefit of the doubt. After a while, I managed to resolve the difficulty by myself, and the word once again emerged as it should from my mouth. Another word I had problems with (these stories date from primary school days) was sacavenense. As well as meaning "a native of the town of Sacavem," which has now been swallowed up by the insatiable dragon that Lisbon has become, it was also the name of a football club that may or may not have survived the vicissitudes of time and the purgatories of the second and third divisions. And how did I pronounce it then? In a truly shocking way that scandalized all who heard me: "sacanavense," which incorporated into the innocent original the word sacana with its echoes of libertinism and masturbation. I can still recall my relief when I was finally able to transpose the ill-bred syllables.

  I must return once again to Rua dos Cavaleiros. The back of our house gave onto Rua da Guia, once known as Rua Suja—Grub Street—that joined another famous street, Rua do CapelÃo, which—accompanied inevitably by a guitar and several glasses of brandy—was always a fateful and unavoidable presence in fado songs and in any reminiscences about that first singer of fados, Maria Severa, and her fictional lover, the Marquis de Marialva. We had a view of the castle too, which is why I remember so vividly those shots whistling over our roof. We lived on the top floor (we almost always lived on the top floor because the rent was cheaper) in a room with use of kitchen, as the advertisements would inform us. There was no mention of a bathroom because such luxuries simply didn't exist, just a drain in one corner of the kitchen, open to the elements shall we say, which was intended for all manner of slops, both solid and liquid. At one point in my novel Manual of Painting and Calligraphy, I write about the women who used to carry to the aforesaid drain the receptacles used for all nocturnal and diurnal deposits and which were usually covered by an immaculate white cloth and called bacios—"chamber pots"—or, more rarely, penicos —"pisspots"—perhaps because the latter was considered too plebeian by the families who used them. Bacio was more refined. I associate the house in Rua dos Cavaleiros and its steep, narrow stairs with the nightmares that afflicted me while asleep and awake, for as soon as night fell, every corner would fill up with shadows from which monsters would reach out to me with great clawed hands, terrifying me with their diabolical grimaces. I remember sleeping on the floor in my parents' room (there was, as I said, only one) and calling out to them, shaking with fear, because underneath the bed or inside an overcoat hanging from the hook or within the distorted shape of a chest of drawers or a chair, indescribable beings were stirring and threatening to leap out at me and devour me. The main source of these terrors was, I believe, that famous fleapit cinema in the Mouraria district, where, with my friend Félix, I received spiritual nourishment from the thousand faces of Lon Chaney, from wicked, cynical people of the very worst kind, from ghostly visions, supernatural magic, accursèd towers, dark underground passageways and from the whole paraphernalia, still in its infancy then, of cut-price collective and individual fear. In one such film, the leading man (that was what he was called in those days, although we denizens of the Fleapit referred to him unceremoniously as "the guy") was seated romantically on a balcony, his right arm resting on the balustrade, and, to judge by the expression on his face, he was thinking of his beloved. Then, after a moment of suspense, a sinister, hooded leper began to climb toward him with agonizing slowness, finally placing one of his disease-ridden hands on the pure white hand of the actor, who, straight away, before our very eyes, contracted Hansen's disease. Never in the history of human illness can there have been such a rapid case of contagion. The result of this horror was that, on that same night, when I was sleeping in the same bed as Félix (I don't know why, since it wasn't usual), I woke up in the dark and saw, in the middle of the room that also served as the other family's dining room, the leper from the film, exactly as he had appeared to us, all in black, with a pointed hood and a tall staff that came up to head height. I shook Félix awake and whispered in his ear: "Look over there." Félix looked and, explain it how you will, he saw exactly what I was seeing: a leper. Terrified, we pulled the blankets up over our heads and lay there for a long time, suffocating from fear and lack of air, until we dared to peer out over the edge of the sheet to find, with infinite relief, that the poor creature had vanished. At the end of the film, "the guy" was cured by the faith that led him to bathe in the grotto at Lourdes, where he entered the water unclean and emerged pristine into the arms of the ingénue, or "the girl," as we equally disrespectfully referred to her. These terrors came to an end when we moved to Rua Fernâo Lopes, where a new fear—of dogs this time—awaited me. Our home in Rua dos Cavaleiros had been an attic room as it would be in Rua Fernâo Lopes. When I looked out the back, the building seemed extraordinarily high, and later, even as an adult, I would often dream that I was falling from there, although the verb "fall" should not be taken literally, that is, in the sense of plummeting helplessly earthward, because what actually happened was that I would drift downward, slowly brushing past the balconies on the lower floors, with their washing hung out to dry and their flower pots, and alight gently and unscathed on the cobblestones of Rua da Guia. Another very vivid memory from those days is of being dispatched by my mother to buy salt from the grocer's opposite, and then, as I was coming back up the stairs, of opening the paper cone it was wrapped in and placing on my tongue just a few grains, which, as they dissolved, tasted at once strange and familiar. I also discovered the most primitive of drinks ever to pass my lips: a mixture of water, vinegar and sugar, the same mixture that I would use, albeit without the sugar, to slake Jesus' thirst in my novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. It was then, too, that I began training myself in "artistic" drawing. I learned to draw a stork and an ocean liner, always the same way, a perfection I repeated over and over which is why, perhaps, I eventually tired of it. From then on, I became incapable of drawing anything, except, out of duty, the engine parts I had to tackle years later at technical college (drawing a cross-section of a carburetor, for example, was a task more suited to the perspicacity of a Sherlock Holmes than to the limited deductive powers of a fourteen-year-old). The person who taught me how to draw the ocean liner and the stork was Félix's father, who, I've just remembered, had very particular ideas about the best methods of applied pedagogy: he used to tie his son's ankle to the table leg with sewing thread and leave him there for as long as it took him to do his schoolwork. I hadn't yet started school then, but I accompanied Félix in his shame and wondered if one day my parents would do the same to me.

  It wasn't all nasty shocks at the cinemas that let in boys like me, with short trousers and close-cropped hair. There were comic cuts too, usually starring Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, but the actors I liked best were Long & Short, who seem to have been completely forgotten. No one writes about them and their films don't appear on television. I used to see them mostly at the Cinema Animatógrafo, in Rua do Arco do Bandeira, where I used to go occasionally, and I remember how I laughed at a film in which they were pretending to be millers (I can see them now). Much later, I learned that they were Danish and that the tall, thin one was called Carl Schenstrøm and the short, fat one Harald Madsen. Given their physical characteristics, it was inevitable that they would one day play Don Q
uixote and Sancho Panza, respectively. That day came in 1926, but I never saw the film. The person I didn't like was Harold Lloyd. And I still don't.

  I haven't yet spoken about my paternal grandparents. As the poet Murilo Mendes used to say of hell, they existed, but were not in good working order. He was João de Sousa and she was Carolina da Conceição, and they were not in the least affectionate, although it's true that they and I had few opportunities to find out how disposed we might be to displays of mutual affection. I saw them only rarely and found their apparent coldness toward me intimidating. This was a set of circumstances that I could clearly do nothing to make either better or worse, and so it seemed only natural that my safe haven in Azinhaga should have been the house of my maternal grandparents, as well as that of Aunt Maria Elvira in Mouchão de Baixo. Besides, Grandmother Carolina was never a particularly warm person. For example, I can't remember her ever giving me a kiss, or if she did, it was only a peck on the cheek (the difference is obvious), and I reckon that if she wasn't going to kiss me properly, it would have been better not to have bothered at all. The person who definitely disapproved of my evident preference for my maternal grandparents was my father, who curtly corrected me one day when I spoke of "my grandparents," meaning my mother's parents, and he made no attempt to conceal his resentment, saying: "You do have other grandparents." What was I supposed to do? Pretend a love I didn't feel? Feelings can't be controlled, you can't just put them on or take them off when convenient, still less if the heart in question is a young heart and therefore guileless and pure. Grandmother Carolina died when I was ten. My mother turned up one morning at the school in Largo do Leão to bring the unfortunate news. She had come to fetch me, perhaps following some social convention of which I knew nothing, but which, apparently, on the death of a grandparent, required the grandchildren to be brought home at once. I remember glancing up at the clock on the wall in the entrance hall above the door, and thinking, like someone making a conscious effort to collect information that might prove useful to him in future, that I should make a note of the time. I seem to recall that it was a few minutes past ten. It appears that my pure and guileless heart had, in the end, decided to play the part of the cool observer subordinating emotion to the objective recording of the facts. The proof of this came with a second and still less pure and guileless thought, namely, that it would be a good idea to shed a few tears so as not to seem like a heartless grandchild in the eyes of my mother and the headmaster, Senhor Vairinho. I do remember that Grandmother Carolina had been very ill and had stayed at our house for some weeks. The bed she occupied was my parents' bed, and I have no idea where they slept during all that time. As for me, I slept in another room in the part of the house we were living in, on the floor with the cockroaches (I'm not inventing this, they used to scamper across me during the night). I remember hearing my parents using a word I thought must be the name of the illness my grandmother was suffering from: albumin (I realize now that she must have been suffering from albuminuria, but I wasn't that far out, since without albumin you can't have albuminuria). My mother used to treat her with warm vinegar poultices, although I don't know why. For a long time, the smell of warm vinegar remained associated in my memory with Grandmother Carolina.